The acrid smell of burnt timber and drenched ash was a personal insult.
It clung to the damp night air, a foul perfume of violation that seeped into the wool of Nell’s coat and settled at the back of her throat.
She stood just inside the cordoned-off entrance to Warehouse Four, her gloved hands clenched into fists at her sides.
The fire had been small, contained with brutal efficiency by her own men before the city’s engines had even arrived, but its message was writ large in the blackened crates and skeletal remains of what had been, only hours ago, a shipment of precision-tooled gears essential for the new engine assemblies.
Another delay. Another cost.
Another wound.
Her foreman, a burly man named Macafee with soot smudged across his brow, gestured to the source.
“Started over here, Mrs. Davies. A pile of oil-soaked rags tucked behind the crates. No lantern nearby, no furnace. It wasn’t an accident,” he declared.
Nell’s gaze was cold as the harbor wind whipping in off the Atlantic. “No, Mr. MacAfee. It was a statement.”
This was different from the equipment failure.
That had been subtle, designed to look like mechanical stress.
This was blatant.
An arsonist’s torch was a cruder weapon, but a clearer one. It spoke of impatience, of an enemy willing to escalate.
Her mind immediately connected the heat of these flames to the ink-stained fire of Ronan Kent’s article.
One attack for the public, another for her operations. A pincer movement designed to cripple her before she ever set the first keel for the Navy.
Silas Croft’s investigation was necessary, but it was slow, meticulous.
She needed a faster, more aggressive countermeasure. She had to fight the narrative as fiercely as she fought the saboteur.
And to do that, she had to face the man who had lit the first match.
“Get this cleaned up,” she commanded, her voice cutting through the hushed aftermath.
“Double the watch rotations. I want guards patrolling every warehouse, every drydock, every shadow in this yard. No one gets in or out without being logged,” she added.
She turned, her back to the ruin, her mind already shifting from defense to attack.
She would not be portrayed as a victim in her own fortress. If Ronan Kent wanted to see a ruthless tycoon, she would show him one. But it would be her ruthlessness, on her terms.
She would drag him through the heart of her empire and force him to see the blood and steel that held it together. S
he would show him fire, yes, but she would meet it with ice.
Ronan Kent read the messenger’s note twice, a cynical smile playing on his lips.
Mrs. Davies grants you an exclusive follow-up. An unrestricted tour of the shipyard. Today. 2 p.m.
Unrestricted.
He snorted. There was no such thing.
The invitation was a trap, a calculated piece of theater designed for damage control.
After his article had landed like a bombshell on the city’s breakfast tables, he’d expected her to stonewall him, to dispatch an army of lawyers.
Instead, she was opening the gates.
It was a bold move.
A foolish one, perhaps.
He folded the note and tucked it into his breast pocket. He would walk into her trap with his eyes wide open, his pen sharpened like a shiv.
She wanted to show him her “humane” operations? He would be looking for the gears grinding beneath the polished facade.
He arrived at the Davies Shipyard promptly at two, the tang of salt and coal smoke thick in the air.
The place was a symphony of industrial might—the percussive clang of hammers on steel, the hiss of steam, the roar of furnaces.
It was the very engine of commerce he’d so eloquently decried, and he felt a grudging respect for its raw, chaotic power.
Nell was waiting for him at the entrance to the main fabrication building, a hard hat clutched in one hand.
She was dressed not in the elegant armor of their first meeting, but in a practical dark skirt and a crisp white shirtwaist, its sleeves rolled to her elbows.
A stray smudge of soot still clung high on her cheekbone, a detail that was surprisingly, infuriatingly, human.
“Mr. Kent,” she said, her voice cool and level, devoid of any warmth. “Punctual. I appreciate that. Time is a commodity we are short on at the moment.”
“So I’ve heard,” Ronan replied, letting his gaze drift pointedly towards the smoke-stained roof of a distant warehouse.
Her jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “Rumors travel fast. The truth, I find, requires a more guided tour. Shall we?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, turning and striding into the cavernous building.
Ronan followed, his senses on high alert.
The heat was immense, the noise deafening. Men, slick with sweat, wrestled with massive plates of steel, sparks showering from grinders like violent constellations.
Nell moved through the chaos with an unnerving calm, her presence a silent command that parted the sea of workers.
“My article mentioned your labor practices,” Ronan shouted over the din, forcing her to stop and turn to him. “Some men claim they work twelve-hour shifts, six days a week.”
“Some men do,” she yelled back, her eyes flashing. She stepped closer, forcing him to lean in to hear her.
Her proximity was a jolt, her scent a clean, sharp contrast to the grime of the workshop.
“And they are compensated with a wage ten percent above the industry average, a hot meal, and access to a company doctor. Ask them, Mr. Kent. Ask them if they would prefer the eight-hour day and empty cupboards offered by my competitors,” she suggested.
She gestured to a foreman, who nodded at her with a respect that seemed genuine.
Ronan watched the exchange, his reporter’s skepticism warring with what he was seeing.
This wasn’t the cowering workforce he’d imagined.
They were hard-pressed, certainly, but there was a fierce pride in their labor, and their deference to Nell seemed rooted in more than just fear.
She led him out of the fabrication hall and along the docks, where the skeleton of a new merchant vessel rose towards the sky.
The sheer scale of it was breathtaking.
“You wrote that I see these ships only as numbers on a ledger,” she said, her voice softer now in the open air, but no less intense.
She ran a gloved hand along a cold steel rivet, a gesture that was almost a caress. “You’re wrong. I see them as promises. A promise of strength, of endurance. A promise to a hundred families that they will eat this winter. A promise that American steel, shaped by American hands, can dominate the world’s oceans.”
Ronan felt an unwelcome stirring of admiration.
She was magnificent in her element, a queen surveying her kingdom.
The passion in her voice was undeniable, a fire that burned as hot as the forges he’d just left. He had to douse it, for his own sake.
“A noble sentiment,” he said, his tone deliberately dry. “One that will surely comfort the family of the man who had his hand crushed last month. A result of faulty equipment, I believe?”
The ice returned to her eyes instantly. “Accidents happen in a place of this size and danger, Mr. Kent. We learn from them. The equipment in question was decommissioned,” she explained.
“We have implemented new daily safety checks. Is that something you’ll be including in your next article? Or does it not fit the narrative of the ‘robber baroness’?”
She had thrown his own words back at him, the title his editor had so proudly slapped on the headline. He felt a flush of something he refused to name—guilt, perhaps. “My job is to report the facts as I find them, Mrs. Davies.”
“Your job is to sell newspapers,” she countered, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous murmur.
They were standing close again, shielded from the wind by the curve of the massive hull. “And a villain sells more papers than a complicated woman running a complex business in a world that wants her to fail.”
For a long moment, they just stood there, the sounds of the shipyard a distant backdrop to the charged silence between them.
He could see the exhaustion etched in the fine lines around her eyes, the sheer force of will it took to maintain her composure.
He saw the fire from the warehouse, the pressure from the contract, the sting of his own words, all converging on this one woman.
And in that moment, his carefully constructed image of a soulless tycoon began to fracture.
He saw a fighter.
The realization was a dangerous current pulling him under. He had to regain his footing. “You still haven’t explained the fire last night.”
Her expression hardened into a mask of pure steel. “The investigation is ongoing. But I can tell you this. My shipyard has had more ‘accidents’ in the two weeks since your newspaper took an interest in me than in the entire year prior. A remarkable coincidence, don’t you think?”
It was a clear accusation, a dagger aimed right at him.
She was implying his article had made her a target, or worse, that he was somehow complicit.
The injustice of it stung, and his own anger rose to meet hers.
“Are you accusing me of being responsible?” he demanded, his voice low.
“I am observing a pattern,” she said, her gaze unwavering. “You shine a light on a supposed weakness, and then that weakness is attacked. First my workforce, then my supplies. You create the narrative, Mr. Kent, and someone else acts it out.”
The tour was over.
They walked back towards the main gate in a tense, hostile silence.
The antagonism between them had become a palpable thing, a crackling energy that was as much about their clash of wills as it was about the undeniable pull that kept them locked in this strange, combative dance.
He hated the way he was starting to question his own convictions, and he hated even more the flicker of empathy he felt for her.
At the gate, she stopped and faced him one last time. “You have had your tour, Mr. Kent. You have seen my men, my ships, my ashes. Write what you will. But know that I am not so easily brought down. This empire was built from nothing, and I will burn anyone who tries to take it from me.”
She held his gaze, and in the depths of her cool gray eyes, he saw not just ice, but the raging fire beneath it.
He saw a woman under siege, fighting with everything she had.
And as he walked away from the shipyard, the scent of smoke on his clothes and the heat of her challenge lingering in his mind, Ronan Kent knew his story had just become infinitely more complicated—and infinitely more dangerous.